Episode #212 – The Power Of Doodles

On this episode Russell talks about how adding sketches to his books and presentations makes them more understandable. He also explains why adding doodles to your own work will help you teach and inspire in a way that is easier for the average person to comprehend.

Here are a few cool thing you can learn from this episode.

How Russell came up with the concept of adding doodles to his books.

Why the doodles make the written word so much more understandable.

Russell’s new idea for a series of videos about the sketches he has used over the years.

So listen below to hear about the power doodles have to increase the overall understand-ability of concepts you are teaching, whether by the written word or during presentations.

Full Episode Transcript

Good morning everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Alright I had to start that one out a little bit louder than normal because it’s a beautiful day and things are amazing. It’s Saturday before our live event, I am actually heading to the office really quick to go finish out some slides, so we can send it to the printer, so that the printers can print them and ship them to the event and I’m excited because that means that, what’s that 6 of my 7 presentations is finished, no technically 5. I think 5 of my 7 presentations are finished, the other one’s just not going to print. This is my deadline, today is my deadline, so I’m hurrying to go get this out the door, so they will be in everyone’s binders when they show up, which is gonna be cool.

And the last thing I’m waiting on, and this is what I wanted to talk about today with you guys because all of us in our businesses are educators. You’re educating your employees, your team, your customers or whatever, even if you’re not in an info product type business you still are an educator and a motivator and a leader and all these kind of things.

I think one of the biggest things that’s helped me over the last few years, and it didn’t happen on purpose, but I’ve been trying to teach a whole bunch of really cool, kind of complex topics for years. The way that was easiest for me to explain is to get someone in a seminar room and we have a white board and I would show them this process and they’d see the process and be like, “Oh, that’s what you’re saying.” And I’m sure a lot of you guys are the same way, which is why most of us internet entrepreneurs are obsessed with whiteboards. We have white boards in our office, we’re sketching things out, we’re showing it to our team that way, we’re doing all sorts of stuff. All of my training videos for years were done on Microsoft paint where I’d just open paint and I’d sketch things because it gets people to understand complex things better.

So rewind probably 2 ½ maybe 3 years ago, when we first started to put together the Dotcom Secrets book, initially it didn’t have all those cool sketches, it was just a typical book. As I was writing the book what I found was, it was interesting, when I teach a seminar I’m on stage, I can sketch out a concept and people are like, “Oh that makes sense.” In a book you have words and you’re trying to explain these concepts and it’s harder because they can’t hear tonality, they can’t see your hand expressions, they don’t see sketches, and it really just makes things suffer. So I was trying to figure out, how can I replicate that process? That’s kind of where some of these sketches were born. One of my close friends, Daegan Smith he probably a year prior had taught this really cool thing on story selling and he had kind of doodled out this whole concept on a whiteboard and he showed it to me and it was awesome. So as a gift to him I had this guy named Vlad on my team go through and turn it to a nice image and I sent it back, “Here you go, man.” And he was like, “Whoa this is so cool. It makes this concept I made look real.” I remember looking at Daegan’s thing that I’d sent him back, and I was like, “This is awesome.”

So I started going back through all my doodles and all the whiteboard sketches and all these things in seminars and workshops, and just for my team and things as I’m doodling out concepts trying to grasp them better, and I went back through and had Vlad take all those concepts and turn them into really cool drawings. And that kind of became the foundation for the Dotcom Secrets book. Every one of these chapters have at least one if not a couple of different doodles so that it’s not just words. Words are hard to visualize and I wanted to take, here’s a bunch of words, but then here’s the graphic representation of what we’re trying to illustrate, and we did that and then boom all the sudden there it is.

So that became how the book was done and I think it was one of the big reasons why people were so successful with it, not just from, “oh this is good book.” But “Wow, this is a book I can actually do something with.” So since that book came out, a lot of other teaching things we do, I’ve had Vlad come in and sketch things out for me and it’s been really cool. So what’s been fun, as you guys know I’ve been working on the Expert Secrets book, so I’ve been having him kind of sketch these concepts the same way we did before and it’s been kind of a slower process. Each chapter I do it and from that chapter there’s two or three concepts we need to sketch out so we can understand it visually.

And that’s been really cool, but since this events coming up it’s kind of cranked up. Because as you know the presentations I’m giving at the event are very tied in line with what I’m teaching in the book. So a lot of them I had to get done quick. So yesterday I submitted 17 or 19, a lot, I think it was 17. 17 sketches to Vlad, I needed him to turn into amazing sketches for my slides, and I took my little chicken scratch that I do, basically I sketch it out on a pad of paper, take a picture of it, upload it to Trello, our office management software, and Vlad grabs it from Trello and makes it look awesome. So I have this book where I’m just sketching idea after idea and concept after concept and trying to get them all in really nice format and add them to Trello and then he goes through and sketches them all, so this morning at 7:57 I was going to work out at 8, 3 minutes earlier, and then all the sudden I look at Trello there’s nothing in there, and one second later he drops 17 images. And it was so cool. All these concepts that are just beautiful now. They look amazing and they’re done and they……I’m excited.

What I’ve done is the last couple of days, I finished my presentations and I just copied and pasted pictures of my hand chicken scratches into these presentations, waiting to replace them with Vlad’s amazing designs and today right now I’m driving to the office to go drag and drop all these designs into slides so that everybody during the presentations will see these things and be like, “Oh my gosh this is amazing.” And they’ll understand really complex topics and make them really simple and broken down. And then these images will be the same one’s that are in the Dotcom Secrets book in the very near future. So I’m excited.

I told you that story because it’s what I’m excited about right now, but second off, I want you guys to start thinking about that as educators, as leaders, as trainers. Sometimes we try to get up and try to share things with people, try to get them to be motivated and inspired, but I think a big problem is that words either vocal or written, a lot of times it’s hard to….typically there’s a process behind the words and words are very much like you’re moving from left to right, up to down, where a lot of times concepts aren’t that way. There’s a motion happening. There’s forward to backward, and backward to forward, and up to down, all these kind of things and it’s hard to capture that a lot of times in words. Where it’s really easy to capture in doodles and sketches and things like that. So what I recommend is to look at what you’re doing or teaching or giving or trying to explain or whatever those things are and figure out ways you can take those complex things and turn them into a doodle or a sketch or something because it’s amazing what that will do.

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen post on Facebook where they took the Dotcom Secrets books and took all the sketches and they blown up and had them printed out and they’re all over their wall and office, which I think is so cool. You look at something and instantly recollect all this stuff that maybe 30 pages of text, and you’re trying to remember and you look at one image and boom everything floods back into your conscious mind and you’ve got it again. You’ve got that concept and you understand it in a way that’s hard from just words.

I think that if you start doing that you’ll see some interesting things that I saw. First off, people you are teaching and training and educating will understand what you’re doing better and you’ll see a higher adoption rate, a higher people doing what you’re trying to share with them. Doing it from an employee standpoint, people understand your vision better and they’ll understand what you want. It’s from an employee/employer side. And I think it’ll give you a ton of clarity as well. As I sketch things out for me, it makes these complex things very tangible and real. And it’s exciting so there you go.

I think I got some cool things I’m going to be doing with this. I’m showing a clip from Gary Vaynerchuk in one of my presentations. The clip’s really cool, he’s sharing one core message, a 30 second video explaining something, and I think I want to start making a video series based on all these little sketches and doodles where I focus on one in each video and just talk about it, give quick impressions on each thing. Anyway, I think that will be born, it’s just an idea right now, but I think in the next couple of months that’s going to be a real thing. So if and when it happens, you guys heard about it first. So there you go, I’m almost to the office, I’m going to go plug in some doodles. I’m excited for this weekend for everyone who’s going to be there. I’m excited to hopefully share, give and inspire and give you guys something that’s going to be amazing. With that said, have an amazing weekend and I‘ll talk to you all again soon.

[bctt tweet=”Even if you’re not an info product type business, you’re still an educator, motivator and leader.”]

[bctt tweet=”Take those complex things and turn them into a doodle or sketch, it’s amazing what that will do.”]

Who is Russell Brunson?

Over the past 10 years, Russell has built a following of over a million entrepreneurs, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, popularized the concept of sales funnels, and co-founded a software company called ClickFunnels that helps tens of thousands of entrepreneurs quickly get their message out to the marketplace.